Fire Sail

by Piers Anthony

  “Here’s how, Rosie. Contact Nia in the freeze. Tell her you have a problem: an inconsolable pilot. You need her help. Let her talk to me through you. You can remain tuned, sharing her outlook.”

  “I could do that,” Rosie said, brightening. She paused. Then her expression changed, becoming more animated, in the manner of a living person. “Hello, Dell,” the real Nia said. “You didn’t want Rosie the Riveter in your bed?”

  “Would I want a robot in my bed if she wasn’t pretty?” he asked rhetorically.

  She laughed. “You’ve found a way for us to keep you company, without eating any of your precious food.”

  “That’s it,” he agreed, hugging her. “I don’t have to go crazy in solitary confinement, or starve.”

  “You don’t,” she agreed.

  Then the scene dissolved, and his friends were with him on the path. He had found a way through, not by being super bold, but by being clever and practical, looking for a shade of gray.

  “I’m glad!” Kadence said, hugging him. She was nine years old, but she hugged well.

  “Well, I couldn’t leave you frozen. Not even for a soft robot.”

  They laughed together. It was great being back with them.

  The path continued to the end. There was a plaque mounted at the terminus.

  WORLD OF X MOONS

  They contemplated it. What did it mean?

  “Maybe Tata will have it in his data banks,” Nia said.

  Then they were out of the dream, one by one, as the peeve interrupted their peephole sights with a wing. Had it been only an hour?

  Chapter 8

  World of X Moons

  “It said what?” the peeve asked as they put away the spent gourds.

  “World of X Moons,” Dell said.

  “Worlds have all manner of moons, ranging from none to dozens. You need a more specific reference.”

  They gave the problem to Tata. His head whirred as multiple worlds and moons flashed across his screen, without end. There were simply too many.

  “What about Jenny Elf, the wolf rider queen?” Nia asked. “She’s from the World of Two Moons.”

  “The World of What?” Dell asked.

  “That’s what it’s called. It has no other name as far as we know. It’s a parallel place.”

  “Oh, one of the Moons of Ida?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a whole different framework, with different magic and I don’t think many puns.”

  “Why did she come here, then? She couldn’t have wanted the puns.”

  “I know that story,” the peeve said. “She had a cat named Sammy whose talent was to find anything but home. He was forever taking off in search of something, then getting lost because he didn’t know where home was. So she tried to keep a close eye on him, chasing after him so she could bring him back. Then one day he went too far, and she got lost too. They were in Xanth. Nobody knows how they managed to cross between worlds, but it was a one-way trip. They never did find their way back to the World of Two Moons.”

  “That must be it!” Dell said. “At least we can ask her.”

  “We’ll go tomorrow,” Nia decided. “We have had more than enough adventure for today.”

  “But we want to hear all about today’s adventure,” the peeve said, peeved.

  “We’ll tell you everything,” Win said excitedly. “I had to help a big spider!”

  “But aren’t you afraid of spiders?” the peeve asked.

  “Yes! At least I was. That’s why I had to do it. To face my fear. And so did the others. It was awful. I mean wonderful.”

  Soon the children were deep into the adventure. Nia set about preparing lunch, while Dell slowly unwound.

  Kadence came to him. “I have to go. I didn’t want to make a scene, so you can tell them if they miss me.”

  “But you’re welcome to remain with us,” Dell said. “You did your part. You also helped me find the way to help Nia.”

  “That was Ula. I just let her speak with you.”

  “Oh. Still, you both helped.”

  “Here’s the thing: I have to return to my own body, in your future, to maintain it so it doesn’t sleep too long. But I’d like to visit again, especially when there’s something interesting going on.” She smiled wistfully. “Maybe I’m like the demoness Metria: looking for interesting things to mess up.”

  “Not at all. I’m sure the kids will welcome you. But how will you know when to come?”

  “That’s the thing. I can’t know on my own, because although this is my past, I can’t remember what hasn’t happened yet in my life, until I return to experience it. It’s maybe like time travel paradox, sort of confusing. But you can help me.”

  “I’m glad to. How?”

  “I have a little ring that’s sort of like a baby monitor. I’m not a baby anymore, so no longer need it.” She removed a translucent ring from a finger. “If you think of me, and tap it, I will get the signal, and know to come.” She proffered the ring.

  “I will do that,” Dell agreed. He put the ring on his littlest finger, where it faded into obscurity.

  “Thank you.” She kissed him on the ear and faded out.

  Now Ula was there. “That’s so sweet,” she said.

  “Sweet? I’m just doing what she asked.”

  “She has a crush on you.”

  His jaw dropped. “But she’s a child! Nine years old!”

  Ula laughed. “Don’t say that to her. That’s how her parents started, when Cyrus dismissed Princess Rhythm because she was only twelve. If you made Kadence mad, she might come back a decade older and seduce you.”

  Dell stared at her, realizing that the warning just might be serious. “Thank you. I will take care not to make her mad.”

  “It’s possible for a child to get a crush, you know. I could get one on Santo.”

  “But he’s—”

  “Yes. So I know better.” She made a wry expression. “Maybe I’ll get one on you instead.”

  Dell opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

  “Just teasing,” she said. “But you are a really nice guy.”

  “Uh, thank you.”

  Ula departed, smiling. Dell, watching her, realized that she was a pretty girl who would one day be a fetching woman. He had not before appreciated how early girls started considering men.

  He also remembered the sweetie pie. It must still be having some effect, awkward as it might be at times.

  Later, he talked with Grania. “You came through beautifully in the dream,” Nia told him.

  “All I did was figure out how to avoid my fear.”

  “That evidently counts too. Getting around something may work as well as forging bravely through it. But I was thinking of the way you helped Santo. And me.”

  “I just did what I could. Santo did a fine job on his own, and you—you have helped me so many times, I was glad to return the favor.”

  She sighed. “I wish I had found a man like you, when I was young. I’d have been so much better off.”

  “And you wouldn’t be here now, helping me.” Then he thought of something. “You must have a granddaughter about my age. I wonder—”

  “She’s a spoiled dishonest brat. Not your type at all, I’m sorry to say.” She laughed. “Neither was I, then. It required lots of age and experience to mellow me. Had I but known then what I know now, what a difference it would have made! But that’s the common irony of life. By the time we know what’s best, it’s too late.”

  “I hate that. I’m young and ignorant. I’d have gone wrong many times already, without your advice and support.”

  She nodded. “At least I can do that much, helping you make the right early choices so you don’t mess up your life as badly as I messed up mine.”

  “I appreciate that,” he said since
rely. “Um, about romantic notions—”

  “Kadence has a crush on you. Ula too, to a lesser degree.”

  So she had seen what he had not. “But I’m nothing!”

  “You’re decent. They notice. And of course that sweetie pie helps.”

  “Yes. Kadence gave me a ring so I can summon her when there’s something interesting happening.”

  “That’s nice. She really wants to be with the children. And with you.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do nothing, in this respect. It will pass.”

  “I’ll do that. I’m such a dunce about such things. I’d have blundered if Ula hadn’t warned me.”

  “That’s her talent: to be useful in unexpected ways.”

  “So it is. I was forgetting.”

  “You’re not really a dunce, Dell. You’re just a typical young man. They are all dunces about women.”

  He laughed ruefully. “Thank you for that reassurance.”

  “Where did she get the ring?”

  “Oh, Kadence? She said it was a baby monitor she no longer needed. Her folks must have given it to her.”

  “But Kadence isn’t here physically. It’s just her spirit animating Ula’s body. Ula doesn’t have a ring, and if she did, it wouldn’t be the right one.”

  Dell pondered that, his surprise growing. “Kadence couldn’t have a physical ring! That would still be on her body in the future. Yet here it is.” He held up his left hand with the ring on his smallest finger.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Well, it’s translucent. It sort of fades into skin color.”

  Nia ran her fingers over his hand. “I don’t feel it either.”

  Now he checked. He could see the ring, but not feel it. “Maybe it’s a ghost ring?”

  “Here is my conjecture: the ring is part of her spirit, evident only to you. When you touch it and think of her, it will alert the rest of her that you want to see her.”

  “Part of her spirit,” he repeated thoughtfully. “So there’s a little bit of her with me, even when she’s not.”

  “Which surely enables her to tune into you when she wants to. It’s a way of indulging her crush on you.”

  “Her crush. That makes me nervous.”

  “Don’t be. Just don’t ever disparage it.”

  “Never,” he agreed. He already knew what a vengeful girl could do.

  Then she held his hand, and he slept.

  In the morning Tata made a map and they set course for the werewolf kingdom. They sailed across the sky, gloriously, the sail burning brightly, this time a towering spiral.

  Dell looked down. There were people below, going about their business. None were looking at the boat. “It’s almost as if they don’t see us,” he said to no one in particular.

  “They don’t,” the peeve said. “There’s a no-notice spell associated with the craft, so it won’t be seen unless you want it to be seen. The princesses did that so as not to attract attention when they went exploring. Especially when they went somewhere they shouldn’t. When they were being naughty. That’s why nobody much knows about Fibot.”

  “Did their parents know?”

  “They may have suspected. But the naughtiness of three young sorceresses was hard to contain, so they mostly ignored it.”

  “I am learning things about Xanth I never dreamed of!”

  “Well, you’re a typical peon.”

  “I am indeed.”

  “How did Jenny get to be a queen?” Win asked. She liked making the wind that powered the fire sail, but she got bored quickly.

  “That was quite a story at the time,” the peeve said. “There was this big wedding, with all the leading folk of Xanth assigned to roles in it, sort of like the one we just saw, only bigger and more mysterious. No one was told who was getting married, but they had to prepare for it anyway. Jenny was assigned to write all the thank-you notes for gifts from the guests. It was an awful chore, but she didn’t complain, she just plowed on. Then she had to help the werewolf prince find his ideal partner, but he had been cursed so that they wouldn’t know each other. Only if she came to him and told him she loved him would the spell be broken.”

  “How could she do that when she didn’t know she was the one?” Win asked.

  “How indeed! It was an awful curse. But they tried to get around it by having all the prospective women come to him one by one and tell him how they loved him. Sort of like the prince who had all the women of the kingdom try on a glass slipper, to see what might fit. That prince got to see up a lot of nice legs.” The peeve chuckled reminiscently. “But for all these women it wasn’t true, it was just an act, but they hoped that if one of them was the right one, he would recognize her when she said the words, and love would blossom, thus getting around the curse. Jenny helped him do it; she seemed to have a touch for it. So there were all these lovely women, and princesses and all doing it, but none of them was the one. Until finally Jenny couldn’t do it anymore, because she was falling for him herself, he being a wolf-man and all. Remember, she’s a wolf rider; there’s an affinity. She tried to go away, because she wasn’t anybody important, just a foreign elf girl, but he insisted on knowing why, and she had to confess her own love. He stared at her and said ‘You’re the one!’ He didn’t care about princesses or lovely women, he just wanted the right one. But she thought he was just humoring her and wouldn’t believe it. Until he kissed her. That blasted the curse apart. And that was the big wedding she had had to write the thank-you notes for: her own. Now she is queen of the werewolves, though she’s a rider, not a were herself.”

  “Oh, I love it!” Win said. She was only eight, but she liked romance. It seemed that all girls did.

  They approached the island off the coast where the werewolf kingdom capital was. It looked pretty much like the rest of Xanth, with scattered tangle trees, dragons and griffins flying about, and other manifestations of magic: unremarkable.

  Dell glanced at his wrist where he still wore the compass he had adapted. It pointed to a garden near the central castle. As they came closer, they saw a woman working in the garden. She wore a small crown. The needle pointed to her.

  They coasted in to a landing on the lawn beside the garden. “I’ll handle this,” the bird said. It flew over to the woman, who looked up. “Oh, hello, peeve,” she said. “What mischief are you up to this time, you naughty parody?”

  “You’ve got to stop giving folk the finger; you can’t spare any more.”

  “And you’ve got to work out some new jokes, birdbrain. Out with it: you’re here for some nefarious reason.”

  “I brought some friends to meet you, Wolf Queen.”

  She laughed. “You have friends?”

  “So to speak. We got a message saying ‘World of X Moons.’ We thought that might be yours.”

  “Oh! Then you must be the ones.”

  The bird was taken aback. “The ones for what?”

  “To help me accomplish my mission.”

  “What mission?”

  “To find a suitable princess for my son Jerry to marry. He’s nineteen, but local princesses are turned off because he’s a werewolf and his human form has pointed ears and only four fingers.” She held up her own four-fingered hand. “You know how it is, with your tired jokes.”

  Now Dell, listening, caught on: four-fingered hands meant she must have given away some fingers. Ha. Ha. Ha. No wonder she wasn’t much amused.

  “Maybe I’d better introduce you to my friends now.”

  “Of course, peeve.”

  “Visibility,” the bird called.

  Tata made a little internal whirring sound. That was all. Now the boat was in plain sight.

  “Oh my,” Jenny said. She stood and walked toward the boat. Evidently she was impressed, though it really didn’t look like much.r />
  “Come in, Queen Jenny,” Nia said, proffering a five-fingered hand to help the elf board the boat. “This is Lydell, I am Grania, and these are Santo, Squid, Win, and Ula. I gather you already know Tata and the peeve.”

  “I do, all too well. Hello, all.”

  “Hello,” the children chorused.

  “I believe I recognize some of you,” Jenny said to the children. “Aren’t you Astrid’s, from the future? I remember the ceremony honoring her and the Demoness Fornax.”

  “You were there?” Win asked. “Why?”

  “Touch me.”

  Confused, Win stepped up to touch Jenny’s four-fingered hand. “Astrid!”

  Santo and Squid stepped up to touch her similarly, and were similarly awed.

  Dell exchanged a glance with Nia. This was odd.

  “Not quite Astrid,” Jenny said. “Let me explain. A few years ago I had a daughter, Jone. We loved her, but she died. She was no older than you, Win.” She mopped away a tear. “We buried her, but along the way her soul fell out and dropped into a hole, and we couldn’t find it. In retrospect I don’t think it wanted to be found; it still had things to do. Years later we learned that it had fallen on a sleeping basilisk, infusing her and giving her motive to do good in Xanth. That was Astrid. That was why she set out to rescue five children from the horrible fate that was stalking them. She worked with her friend the Demoness Fornax, and together they accomplished it, and here you are.” She took a breath. “When a baby is delivered, it takes half its mother’s soul. Each half regenerates in time into a whole soul, but they still have a strong affinity for each other. You children know the essence of Astrid’s soul, which was Jone’s soul, originally half of mine. So you know my soul also.”

  The three gazed at her. They looked as if they were in sudden love. Santo too; this transcended romantic love.

  “It seems your daughter helped us,” Nia said carefully. “Now it seems we are here to help your son.”

  “Yes!” the three children said almost together.

  “And it seems we are committed. How may we help you find your son a princess?”

  “I believe there must be a suitable princess on the World of Two Moons, where I came from. There aren’t kingdoms or monarchies there, but the daughter of a chief would be equivalent. She would have the ears and fingers and be suitable in other respects. So I need a lift to my home world for that purpose, hoping to persuade one to come here. The Good Magician told me he would arrange it in due course. It seems he did so.”